I don’t remember much from my two brief years at boarding school – I was only eight. But do I remember one thing vividly: a school play that included a reference to “the visitors”. All the older girls and teachers laughed at this, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t funny. Afterwards, I was told that “visitors” were periods, though I don’t think I knew what periods were either. And that was my first exposure to society’s endless talent for euphemising an inevitable and natural aspect of women’s lives: the monthly shedding of the lining of their uterus.

Uterus. Yuck. What a horrible word. Vagina: even worse. Menstruation sounds like a disease. Menarche, endometrium: what do they even mean? Euphemisms are everywhere. Having written a book on sanitation, I’ve become expert at them. Languages have always contained them: the Greeks called them the Furies, those rather angry goddesses, or the Gracious Ones in the hope they would be. And they gave us the word “euphemism” in the first place – “to use a favourable word in place of an inauspicious one”. Euphemising is the opposite of blaspheming. The same magic was supposed to work when the Cape of Storms was renamed the Cape of Good Hope, although it stayed just as stormy.

UK company to introduce 'period policy' for female staff

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Perhaps that wishful thinking is why the menopause is known as “the change”, a bland word that holds none of the distress and despair of endless hot flushes, depression, brain fog and eradication of libido. Or maybe it’s a way of sticking women’s health in the dark and unspoken corner where it’s supposed to belong.

Perhaps it’s why periods have so many alternative identities. Once in India, I was puzzled when my friend Sabrina started talking about “chumming”. Chums, for English-speaking Indians, are periods. The Gracious Ones. There are at least 5,000 others, according to a new survey done by the makers of a women’s health app called Clue, in partnership with the International Women’s Health Coalition. Here are a few: on the rag (a term that always made me look at student rag weeks in a different light), the curse, shark week, having the painters in, Aunt Flo, and of course the infinitely useful “time of the month”. Who else remembers their PE teacher asking if anyone was skipping a shower that week? Some other findings from the 90,000 responses Clue received: 95% of Algerians feel comfortable talking to female family members about periods; 86% of Russian women and girls would hate to talk to a male classmate about them. Some 93% of Pakistanis wouldn’t talk to a male family member about it, while 45% of Swedes would.

This is a very welcome survey, though of no surprise to me: I’ve known since travelling around India with a sanitation carnival called the Yatra how periods in much of the world are supposed to take place in silence. On the Yatra, a menstruation tent was set up in every site we visited. The organisers didn’t expect that women would turn up, because menstruation in India is so taboo (after all, it’s the country where if you touch pickles while on your period, you turn them rotten). But even on public holidays, there were lines out of the door of women who were desperate to talk about periods, and to learn about them. And 73% told us their mothers or female relatives had told them nothing about it. I interviewed young girls who were convinced they were dying of cancer when they started bleeding.

Nor is this coyness about our bleeding female bodies confined to the developing world. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never excreted a blue liquid, or worn white trousers on my period.

Banished for menstruating: the Indian women isolated while they bleed | Gagandeep Kaur

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Yet times are changing. The last few years have been revolutionary. There is now a Menstrual Hygiene Day. There are advertisers who are daring to talk frankly about tampons and sanitary hygiene (this Hello Flo ad is one of my favourites, though I won’t encourage the use of commercial tampons until manufacturers tell us what’s in them). Bodyform is about to launch a campaign to get period emojis added to the Unicode keyboard, on the grounds that young women are mortified to talk about periods, but they might use an emoji. Artists are showing menstrual blood. Proctor & Gamble launched a great social media campaign called Touch the Pickle (we’ll talk about why huge healthcare companies are targeting the developing world another time). And now a Bristol company is planning to create an official “period policy” designed to allow women to take time off without being stigmatised.

Whatever it takes to bring periods out of the realm of secret and hidden is fine with me. But euphemisms are fine with me too. It would be nice if we were capable of talking more clearly and scientifically about our bodies. But what’s damaging the lives of millions of schoolgirls and women is not daft and coy terms for periods, but being unable to talk about them at all, or being so ashamed that they have to dry their sanitary cloths under the beds or in the damp, getting urinary infections or worse. Unesco estimates that one in 10 African girls, for example, miss at least one day of school a month, leading to a higher drop-out rate. A survey in India found nearly 25% of girls drop out of school permanently when they reach puberty, because they have no toilet at school. As long as we can talk about periods openly, and stop all the disease and degradation that comes from women’s bodily functions being thought polluting or dangerous, you can call them what you like.

This article was amended on 3 March 2016. An earlier version referred in error to “dementia”; that word has been replaced by “brain fog”.

As one of the 5-8% of women who suffer from premenstrual dysphoric disorder, the most extreme form of PMS, I know how disabling and even life-threatening it can be. Medicine must take women’s health more seriously